Denmark Win the European Championships

First-off, an apology regarding my last post:

Anonymous
You forgot Sweden as a participant!

Well, I didn't "forget" them, I just highlighted the wrong team - Turkey in the first table instead of Sweden - and so took Turkey across to the second table. Sorry about that. Anyway, you still get the picture and I can't be bothered to redo the tables.

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Aah, so it's not Portugal who win the European Championships, as I boldly stated in my last entry. Nope, amazingly Denmark will pull-off another almighty shock just as they did back in '92.

So what do I base this new brash assumption upon? It's based on additional Elo points gained during the last year. Here's the table to prove it:

Yes, Denmark have gained more Elo ranking points this year than any other team. Not sure how relevant these particular stats are, mind you: look at Holland, undoubtedly one of the more likely teams to figure prominently in the competition yet down in last place in my table, with -56 points.

If you want to view how the Elo World Rankings would work for the first eight matches of the European Championships, you can see the details in the downloadable spreadsheet HERE.

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Don't like those stats. Okay, how about these. Let's look and see if there is any correlation between FIFA World rankings and past success in the European Championships. Let's see who's outstripped their world ranking the most and who has fared the worst.

Just like the previous posts, I will only be looking at Euro ’96 onwards due to the format change in the competition at that point. The FIFA World rankings are easily available for all the ’96, ’00, ’04 and ’08 Championships.

For each previous European Championship, I have taken the world rankings from May of each relevant year, so one month before each competition started. The non-European teams have obviously been excluded from these rankings, so I’ve therefore “scrunched” their positions up to fill any vacant slots. The rankings of course have absolute numbers, but when comparing those rankings against final position within each competition, I’ve had to make some decisions:

Winner of competition     = First (no shit)
Runner-up                 = Second 
Losing Semi-finalist      = 3.5 (average of 3rd and 4th)
Losing Quarter-finalist   = 6.5 (average of 5th to 8th)
Losing in Group Stage     = 12.5 (average of 9th to 16th)

Therefore if a team is ranked 4th in the world according to FIFA, then they would be expected to reach the 3.5 level (semi-finals) in the Euros. If they do better than that, they will attract a positive score; if, however, they only make it to the quarter-finals, then they will receive a negative score (3.5 minus 6.5).

This of course is completely unfair as, if a country is always near the top of the world rankings, then they can only meet their expectations but rarely better them, whilst weaker, lower-ranked teams can more easily exceed the ranking. This is graphically demonstrated with this table:

Hmm, Portugal out in front again. Let's ignore that for now, and try and tailor our ranking a bit better. How about if I give each team a starting value of 1 to 16 points dependent on their current world ranking? So Spain will get a 16 point head-start.

Oh damn. It's Portugal again, the one-man team that is not fancied at all this time around - especially as they are in the "group of death".

Oh well. As I said yesterday, you only have one choice. Lump on! :-)

Portugal Win the European Championship

What's this? A prediction? Well, no, not really. Tomorrow I will produce a similar headline with a different team based on different statistics, but today's stats are all about past performance in the Euros.

Here is a table showing all the historical results since Euro '96:

The teams coloured in pink(ish) are those teams who will be participating in this year's European Championships. Obviously due to things like qualification for past competitions and progression within those competitions, the teams have played a variable number of matches within the Euros. The standard three points for a win, one point for a draw is given in my table - not only for the group stages but for all matches played, right up to the final. Do please shout if you strongly disagree with that method.

So, let's look who performs well in the Euros. We have the obvious candidates such as Spain (33 pts), Holland (32 pts) and Germany (31 pts), but out in front is Portugal with a surprising 37 pts, which is made up of 12 wins and one draw. England have only managed 19 pts, but of course we don't always qualify for the tournament.

Removing all the teams who are not in this year's competition, the table below translates their wins, draws and losses into percentages:

This shows that Portugal have won 63.16% of all their matches, which is an excellent win rate considering that early rounds tend to be played less aggressively than later rounds. France and Holland also perform well (55.56%) in the Euros - which doesn't bode too well for England come Monday.

The hosts, Poland, have never won a match in the Euros, but have only qualified once. Ukraine have never qualified (since '96 that is).

So, place every penny you have in your bank account on Portugal, because the statistics speak for themselves...

Unless you wait for tomorrow.

More Euro Trash

More fanciful statistics for your delectation. Again, make up your own minds on the worth of these. I'll throw them over to you and you can do what you want with them. My advice would be to treat this information with a large dose of caution, but if you do take anything from them, then read the data in conjunction with that given in the previous post.

Below is a table showing the average goal scoring times during the last four European Championships, separated out into the Group Stages (sub-divided here to 1st eight games, 2nd batch of eight games and 3rd batch of eight games), then quarters, semis and the final. The data again becomes extremely thin indeed as less teams become involved at each stage.

If the data has any worth, then a paucity of goals in the first half of the first eight matches seems to be a pattern. And a return to a cautious approach seems to be the order of the day after having escaped from the group stages, as the quarter finals tend to have late goals.

Euro Trash

Just a brief look at some simple Under/Over 2.5 Euro stats, which you may find helpful or you may find completely useless. I say completely useless as there is a rather small sample from which we can take our Euro data.

Before Euro '96 in England, there were only two groups of four teams in the group stages, so we can really only look at Euro '96 onwards for similar types of data; and in doing so, we have this:

Not too many surprises really. In the Group Stages, the first round of eight games (2 matches in each of the four groups) the trend is towards Under 2.5 goals, as teams come out cautiously, trying not to lose rather than trying to actively win. This starts to disappear in the second batch of eight games (perhaps a team has lost their first match and now need to show a bit more resolve to continue further); and the last group of eight matches in the Group Stages moves into Over 2.5 goals, as teams go all out for victory in the hope of progressing.

The quarter finals through to the finals don't really show any trends (as mentioned, largely due to the small sample). I suppose we could take the World Cup data into consideration as this follows a similar format, but this of course introduces other variables such as the manner in which certain continental teams tend to play and the styles with which they are accustomed to. I may add-in this data just for fun though. We'll wait and see.

I'm Back

Hi to everyone. I'm back from my little sojourn over in South East Asia, and it's good to be back - if a little strange as everything seems so, so quiet in comparison. I can almost hear a pin drop in England despite the Jubilee celebrations that are now building up nicely.

So, Manila. What can I say? Home of the nice-coloured envelope, there are nearly 80 million people in the Philippines, 15 million in Manila, which is one of the largest and most densely populated cities in the world. The place is a huge urban sprawl, exceptionally hot, horribly polluted, filthy dirty and desperately poor. It's a city with the most stunningly bad driving I've ever seen (Rome, for example is like a gentleman's club in comparison). There is absolutely no road etiquette and every car pushes in front of the other, changes lanes without warning, beeps, flashes their lights constantly and recklessly tries to steal every last inch of space from each other.

The place absolutely stinks of shit from the poor sewage system; there are huge cockroaches the size of small rats roaming the streets in gangs; homeless, horribly deformed people sitting on the pavements begging; blast-furnace temperatures and more prostitutes than you could shake a stick at...

And you know what? I absolutely loved the place. Despite everything, it's the people that get under your skin. Most of them have little or nothing in the way of possessions but are happier and more content than we are. They can sit on a stool with a beer in their hand and not have a care in the world. I love that attitude and feel that we can learn a lot from them and their outlook on life.

Anyway, this ain't no travel diary, so I'll shut up about my trip and turn my attention to betting and trading. I only returned on Friday, but some bright spark thought it would be a good idea if they took me along to the Epsom Derby yesterday. I was horribly jet-lagged, but the day turned out to be good fun, in spite of losing a bit of money and once falling asleep on the grass surrounded by a mass of picnickers. The winner from Britain's Got Talent (a lady with her performing dog) did a turn, the Red Devil's parachute team dropped onto the (very windy) course, the queen and Prince Philip turned up and Katherine Jenkins (top totty) sang the national anthem. All good stuff.

The racing, however, surpassed all this easily. A top-class card with some outstanding horses. I don't know much about the GGs, but seeing a six foot one inch jockey (Joseph O'Brien) riding the two top favourites, St Nicholas Abbey and Camelot, to victory was a bit of a surprise. At only 19 years old, he seems to have exactly the right temperament to be a top jockey, although his height may eventually curtail his career as he fills out.

Of course since I've been away, all sorts of excitement and amazing drama has taken place in my absence: a heart-stopping last day of the season, Chelsea finally realising their dream and the odd Premier league sacking or two. Incredibly I completely missed all of this, not catching a single match or sporting event of any kind while I was away.

This, of course, means that I'm ready to rock and roll when the Euros start shortly. I'll be trading away like billy-o, although I will be away from the 15th to the 18th as I'm taking my patient and understanding wife away to Milan for a long weekend, which I'm looking forward to.

This is slightly bad planning on my part of course as I shall be missing some games, including one England match. I should, however, still have plenty of trading to do throughout the rest of the competition.

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Having a quick browse around at blogland to see what's been happening, I notice a couple of established bloggers have hung up their keyboards. This is a shame but if you have something better to be doing (and quite honestly, who doesn't?) or it's no longer fun, then why not stop blogging? It should be fun to do and not an onerous task.


I did also spot this entry HERE from Cassini about the time of the first goal for games that have a low goal expectation:

I have seen a few comments about the correlation between Under / Over prices, and the TOFG (Time of First Goal) markets, and someone (I forget who, sorry) recently left a comment suggesting that the Half-Time 0-0 market might be another opportunity. It certainly should be, and is something I'll be tracking next season. For the record, in 2011-12, of the 156 XX Draw selections, 60 were 0-0 at half-time (38.5%, IP 2.6) and the average TOFG (when there was one) was 33.66 minutes. Unfortunately, I do not know what the HT 0-0 prices were, nor what the average TOFG is, but I would hope that both offer some value.

I do collect goal times for various leagues and can provide this small snippet of information that may be helpful. The goal average times for under/over matches in the English Premier League for the 2011/12 season are:


                  Total 1st goal         2nd goal        3rd goal
Over 2.5 goal matches: 204 24.03 42.53 63.14
Under 2.5 goal matches: 176 49.18 78.55 N/A


I can provide the median also if those are wanted by anyone. Note that for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd goal averages, if that number of goals wasn't achieved then a value of 93 minutes is used to build the averages. There are arguments for and against this practice. We should also be aware of the large amount of variance within these figures, but as a general statement it would appear that for games with low goal expectations, there generally won't be a goal in the first half. We could also say that if there is no goal after the first half-an-hour, then the match will probably not be an Overs match.

We could also say that there could be value at that very point for certain teams! Which, for me, is the benefit of collecting and analysing score data for all leagues and for all teams within those leagues.

Balut!

Once again, I've been a bit naughty when it comes to keeping my blog updated, so please take it as read that I have fully chided myself and given myself a small smack on the back of the hand (which does sting). As always, there are a hatful of absolutely superb reasons for my absence, none of which I shall trouble you with, as I have no doubt they are of zero interest to all of you.

Tonight was interesting for me (or perhaps the very start of something interesting), because besides my usual trading on the Manchester derby, I did have a straight bet on the match odds market, backing Man City for £50 to win. This was hardly high-roller stuff, but the bet was my very first bet based on some intriguing new research that I've been working intensively over the course of the last couple of weeks, and which I'm hoping will be worth it over the long term.

The research, and the accompanying results that I've painstakingly collated, have yielded some generic odds for matches based on certain metrics and characteristics of each match in question. This means that, as far as these particular stats are concerned, absolutely no consideration is given to the teams that happen to be playing or which players are involved. This interests me greatly as it could herald the ideal "lazy man's" betting system (if it works of course).

Anyway, I've backtested this research over seven years worth of football data across eight leagues, and the results look very encouraging (indeed perhaps "too" encouraging).

Tonight was, I suppose, just a taster of what I will be doing in earnest from next season onwards. I have to confess that the trader in me was just itching to trade-out when I was £50 in profit, but I decided to just let the bet ride, as that's precisely what I will be doing when I actually run this system next season.

This single result means absolutely nothing as we all know, but it really was a case of me being so excited by my stats that I just couldn't wait to try them out before next season. It's my intention to fully trial this method on my blog come August, with enough leeway given for a weighty amount of variance. So we shall see what we shall see.

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Okay, seeing as this is the last day of the month, I can now give you an overall P/L for April, and I'm sad to say that I've finally seen my long unbroken my run of profitable months come to an end. It had to happen at some time. The overall loss for this month is small and insignificant, but it's particularly annoying as I had been in the red for most of the month, managed to claw it all back and move back into the black - only for another few losses to plonk me straight back into the red again. Good night tonight on the Manchester derby, giving me over £150, but overall this month has been disappointing.


Football: -£131.51 | Horse Racing: -£5.04 | Tote: |  Total P&L:  -£136.55 

 

Football Showing 1 - 20 of 118 markets

Market Start time Settled date Profit/loss (£)
Football / Man City v Man Utd : Correct Score 30-Apr-12 20:00  30-Apr-12 22:04  47.14
Football / Man City v Man Utd : Over/Under 1.5 Goals 30-Apr-12 20:00  30-Apr-12 22:01  14.33
Football / Man City v Man Utd : Over/Under 2.5 goals 30-Apr-12 20:00  30-Apr-12 22:01  23.77
Football / Man City v Man Utd : Match Odds 30-Apr-12 20:00  30-Apr-12 21:54  67.66
Football / Tottenham v Blackburn : Over/Under 2.5 goals 29-Apr-12 16:00  29-Apr-12 17:55  11.28
Football / Tottenham v Blackburn : Correct Score 29-Apr-12 16:00  29-Apr-12 17:54  40.67
Football / Chelsea v QPR : Over/Under 4.5 Goals 29-Apr-12 13:30  29-Apr-12 14:55  -196.95
Football / Paderborn v FSV Frankfurt : Correct Score 29-Apr-12 12:30  29-Apr-12 14:25  50.51
Football / Dynamo Dresden v St Pauli : Correct Score 29-Apr-12 12:30  29-Apr-12 14:21  50.51
Football / Numancia v Villarreal B : Match Odds 28-Apr-12 17:00  28-Apr-12 18:52  -20.00
Football / Levante v Granada : Match Odds 28-Apr-12 17:00  28-Apr-12 18:50  19.82
Football / Wolfsburg v W Bremen : Match Odds 28-Apr-12 14:30  28-Apr-12 16:22  19.44
Football / B Munich v Stuttgart : Match Odds 28-Apr-12 14:30  28-Apr-12 16:21  -14.80
Football / West Ham v Hull : Correct Score 28-Apr-12 12:30  28-Apr-12 14:23  35.13
Football / Metz v Angers : Match Odds 27-Apr-12 19:00  27-Apr-12 20:53  19.06
Football / Ath Bilbao v Sp Lisbon : Correct Score 26-Apr-12 20:05  26-Apr-12 22:02  60.14
Football / Real Madrid v B Munich : Correct Score 25-Apr-12 19:45  25-Apr-12 21:35  -187.74
Football / Leicester v West Ham : Over/Under 3.5 Goals 23-Apr-12 19:45  23-Apr-12 21:45  -14.60
Football / Leicester v West Ham : Correct Score 23-Apr-12 19:45  23-Apr-12 21:43  61.13
Football / Leicester v West Ham : Over/Under 2.5 goals 23-Apr-12 19:45  23-Apr-12 21:06  22.84



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I do also have some other exciting news (well, exciting for me at least). I've managed to secure a six weeks contract working over in the Philippines, and I leave this coming friday. This has all been a bit last minute, but I've decided to grab the opportunity while I can. This of course will mean that I won't be able to see out the end of the footy season, but it does happily mean that I will be back just in time for the European Championships. My return date is June 1st.

This explains the title post and the rather unpleasant picture above. One of the delicacies over in the Philippines is a half-cooked, ready-to-hatch duck egg, which they call balut. They sell this on street corners and it's thought to be an aphrodisiac. The idea is just to open it and eat it right out of the shell. This, along with spicy cow vagina, is just some of the delights that await me when I land in Manila this coming Saturday. And yes, I do promise not to come back with a mail-order bride (I don't think the missus would be too pleased if I did).

So, I'll be effectively signing-off here for the rest of the season, but I do intend to fully trade the Euros in June. I do also have a backlog of (hopefully) interesting blog posts that I have written or half-written, so these should be helpful to some people when I get round to posting them. These include additional match compilation methods, and other statistical analysis posts.

See you all in June.

In the words of David Coleman...

"Quite remarkable!"

Being away in my hotel this evening, I went down the pub to watch the Barcelona v Chelsea match - and what a corker it was. A stonewall sending-off, a missed penalty by Messi no less, a goal nearly scored by Drogba from the halfway line, and a late goal by the man who couldn't find his own arse with both hands, Mr Torres. And throughout all this, the most fantastic bravura, sterling defensive performance against all the odds by Chelsea against the best team in the world, with their backs to the wall and down to ten men for fifty minutes.

I was a good boy this evening and didn't have any "fun" bets while watching the game. I did, however, have a little look at the markets on my phone, and saw that Barcelona were 1.01 at half-time to win the match. Unfortunately I didn't lay them at 1.02 but any of those speculators out there who did so would have done very well for themselves.

I'll do a proper update on what I've been doing tomorrow.